Category Archives: Nature

Bird Blessed

Posted on May 17, 2016 by Sandy Stott | Comments Off

In Boston yesterday and ornithologist said significantly, “If you held the bird in your hand –;” but I would rather hold it in my affections. – Thoreau, Journal, 5/10/54

I am 150 miles southwest of my usual range, here in Connecticut on a family visit, and, by coincidence, now in Stafford Springs for the Soapstone Mountain Trail Race. It’s a blustery morning, with the wind blowing cool reminder from home.

I replace the word “race” with the friendlier “run” and set out at the command of our director, a slight woman perched atop a glacial erratic. We are a many-footed beast, and we shuffle down a dirt road, headed for the single-track trail ahead. There, at first, we will bunch like a human scrunchie, but, over time, we will stretch all the way to solitude.

Our way is marked by white paint dots and, at junctions by ankle-high flaglets that remind of a dog’s electronic boundary. “Don’t go over there, boy,” I say to self and I stay of track.

The run becomes a collage of little moments and the always-rhythm of attention to footsteps; the sights and my own little song take me elsewhere, out of this world.

An then, at 20k, just past the last aid station with its caloric and human boost – “Nice going; almost there” – I’m flagging; the little laughter of two girls who just passed me recedes in the hardwoods ahead, and it’s just tired me here. Sigh, why? A flash of color draws my eye and a scarlet tanager lights at eye level on a branch 15 feet away. His brightness wrings a smile from me, lifts my head, and he stays, his scarlet kindled against the lime-green leaves just unfurling. I stop, watch, want to trill a birdsong of thanks. Any sense of needing to be elsewhere vanishes.

Now I can go on.

So it is to be bird blessed in woods near or far.

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Posted in Environment, General, Henry David Thoreau, Living Deliberately, Nature, News and Events, The Roost, Thoreau Quote

Green Rider

Posted on May 13, 2016 by Sandy Stott | Comments Off

These days, when a soft west or southwest wind blows and it is truly warm, and an outside coat is oppressive, — these bring out the butterflies and the frogs, and the marsh hawks, which prey upon the last. Just so simple is every year.” Thoreau, Journal, 4/5/54

Back from today’s run, I set to the dull-but-necessary stretching, and, while bent variously, I see motion where there’s usually none. It is tiny motion, to be sure, but on vision’s periphery, where the laces of my shoe cross, binding me in, something’s stirring. “Ah,” says my hoppy mind, glad for any distraction from the stasis of stretch-and-hold.

The motion bunches, then reaches and a new season begins – I have spring’s first green rider, who must have hitched this ride somewhere back in the woods. And, given that my rider’s on my shoe and lime-colored, not long ago it must have been grazing on a blade of trailside grass. But now, on this charcoal-colored expanse, it is obvious, a magnet for whatever eye is aloft.

Shoe with rider

Later in the season, this little guy’s relatives will be well over an inch long, but this one’s well under the measure of what may be his name. Inchworm? I click into the wires of research.

More names: “measuring worms, spanworms, loopers,” that’s reason enough for research. Then there’s motion’s method: “An inchworm moves by drawing its hind end forward while holding on with the front legs, then advancing its front section while holding on with the prolegs.” Prolegs? Do I have any of those? Sounds like a trademark. I look at my one-after-the-other feet. My green rider appears to be waving as he searches for a way down off the raised lace of mid-shoe.

Reaching, waving…there must be food out there somewhere; got to keep at it. By now – you probably agree – I have overstretched.

So it’s time for the green-rider-ritual: I stand and walk carefully over to the nearest weed, a dandelion this time, and I pluck a leaf, which I then place in the path of my rider. He reaches out, touches the leaf’s edge, but I am vibrating a bit, and, suspicious of the shaky world, he pulls back, heads off 90-degrees away. I shift the leaf to his path again. What an odd world where a leaf recurs in each direction? Well, he must think, nothing to do but get on board, and he loops up and on.

Now, following reason’s path, I go to the grass at lawn’s border and settle the rider’s leaf in it. A couple of loops take him off-ship, into a new world. I go back to stretching, back the linear track of today.

But now, as I coax flex into my muscles, I’m thinking about metamorphosis: if all goes as it should for the little green rider, some days in the future, he’ll give up looping, inching along and fly away. He is a moth-in-the-making.

And, if all goes well for me, I, a runner-in-the-making, will return to the trails tomorrow for the closest motion to flight I know.

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Posted in Arts, Environment, General, Henry David Thoreau, Living Deliberately, Nature, The Roost, Thoreau Quote

Setting Out

Posted on May 11, 2016 by Sandy Stott | 2 comments

Late in May, 1849, Henry Thoreau published his first book. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, met little public enthusiasm, and because Thoreau had taken on some debt to get his book out, in the end he owed money. The best he seemed able to realize from the venture was his famous “library” joke, wherein he boasted to owning over 1000 books, 700 of which he had written himself. Not a promising start for a most famous writer.

Still, May is a month for fliers – for seeing them, and for taking them – and I’ve returned to the rivers and thickets of A Week as an appreciation for flight, for the setting out that is all enterprise – on water, on air. Pick your liquid. But, once you have, set forth on it.

Thoreau opens A Week with a short chapter of long sentences about the Concord River, and he is intent on epic associations before setting out on his own. He describes his local river as,

…a huge volume of matter, ceaselessly rolling through the plains and valleys…making haste from the high places of earth to its ancient reservoir. The murmurs of many a famous river on the other side of the globe reach even to us here,…many a poet’s stream floating the helms and shields of heroes…The Xanthus or Scamander is not a mere dry channel and bed of a mountain torrent, but fed by the ever-flowing springs of fame;…

Ah, to Troy even. All this before we cast off with Thoreau and his brother John, who set out on Saturday, the next chapter.

At length, on Saturday, the last day of August, 1839, we two, brothers, and natives of Concord, weighed anchor in this river port; for Concord too, lies under the sun, a port of entry and departure for the bodies as well as the souls of men;…

It’s near noon, and now’s the time. I shuck off my work, putting aside my keyboard. And…avert your eyes…I shuck off my clothes too…in favor of others less long-sleeved and leg-sheathed. Then I tie my feet into trail shoes, and I’m off.

The way

When you run, however slowly, the land too is liquid. And, after the obligatory whinging from everything that’s been sitting all morning, I begin to flow along the spring-soft trail, and on into the woods. I am, along this wave-wrinkled land, a foot-pilot, steering first between those two pines, then over the crest of a rise.

What’s on the other side? Let’s go see.

Along a long way

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Posted in Arts, Environment, General, Henry David Thoreau, Literature, Living Deliberately, Nature, The Roost, Thoreau Quote